In the social media age, there’s no such thing as local politics anymore. Even a law that would only affect one state or county or city can easily become a meme online and put a spotlight on an issue that people might care passionately about even if it’s not in their backyard. Case in point: #StandWithWendy.

On Tuesday, Texas Sen. Wendy Davis went on an athletically-long filibuster run in the Texas Senate to block a vote on Senate Bill 5 (SB5), which would have essentially shuttered many abortion clinics in the state and blocked the procedure after 20 weeks of pregnancy. As her marathon filibuster ran close to the state senate’s midnight deadline, thousands of people from all over the country began tweeting #StandWithWendyto show their support for the woman who had been on her feet all day to stop SB5. And the geographic distribution of tweets about the filibuster—at least some part of an organized effort—shows coast-to-coast support for the state senator’s stand in the Austin legislature.

The map above, created by the academic research group Floating Sheep, shows that while the volume of Twitter activity for #StandWithWendy was—naturally—greatest in Texas itself (nearly 29 percent of all tweets), there was also quite a bit of chatter coming out of places like New York state (8 percent), California (12 percent) and even places like Illinois (4 percent). The most interesting thing about the data, Floating Sheep’s founder and “chief shepherd” Matthew Zook told Wired is “the way that social media can make a relatively local concern (i.e. state-level legislature) and quickly make it into a national event.”

Following Sen. Davis’ filibuster meme images like this mash-up of the state senator and one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons from Game of Thrones began popping up on social media. Image via Tumblr

To try to account for differences in population by state and normal tweet output for a geographic region, Floating Sheep researchers normalized the data using its proprietary Dolly system to make sure certain states weren’t showing higher levels of support simply because they have more people or tend to tweet a lot. What they found showed that while Texas still lead the pack, states like Oregon and Montana had more #StandWithWendy tweets than the national average.

“The spatial differences are particularly telling when one looks not just at the raw number of tweets, but rather a value normalized by the total number of tweets sent during this time,” Zook wrote in a blog post Friday announcing Floating Sheep’s findings. “Doing so allows us to avoid simply highlighting those places with a large number of people by comparing a given place’s production of #StandWithWendy tweets relative to its ‘usual’ tweet output.”

Of course, Floating Sheep’s data is only looking at Twitter and the online response to Sen. Davis’ filibuster went far and wide online, from Tumblr to Vine. But seeing as the web became the place where the news unfolded when it didn’t get picked up quickly by national cable news (at least 182,000 people watched it via livestream, however), the tweets and their geo-locations provide a lot of interesting insight into how the nation watches more localized news events. For example, Floating Sheep found one interesting pattern that showed a fairly large discrepancy between the number of tweets between two adjoining counties in the Atlanta area.

Zook, a professor in the geography department at the University of Kentucky, is the first to note the Twitter data is in no way a completely comprehensive look at the overall conversation about issues like SB5 within the United States–it’s limited to people who use Twitter and happen to be on it, after all–but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating.

“My basic concern—as always—is how inclusive these social media conversations are,” Zook told Wired via email. “It is useful to see how events play out in Twitterspace, but democracy is a much more complicated and multi-modal/multi-spatial endeavor.”